Both the left and right are accurate in their analysis of Barack Obama’s speech in Kansas this week: it is both, as his defenders have argued, a stirring critique of the uneven playing field in the modern economy, and, as conservatives have suggested, the most unadorned liberal rhetoric from a Democratic presidential nominee since the seventies. Obama has just invited the country to decide 2012 not on the basis of his mixed job creation record, or his incremental proposals (a mild cut in payroll taxes, a mild hike in millionaire taxes) but squarely on ideology.

It’s a threat Republicans should not take lightly. As much as Republicans cite 1980 as the precedent for next year, thirty odd years ago it was liberals who were on the defensive. A decade plus of left-leaning initiatives, abetted by Republicans - hyperspending, a migration of authority from local levels to Washington - had wrecked prosperity and sapped public confidence. Circa 2012, the culprits are weirdly reversed, and it is conservative policies under fire: ten years of Washington and Wall Street aligning to strip the risk and responsibility out of the free market, and a devaluing of government as an effective public institution, with the result a loss of faith in our national purpose.

Democrats were mauled in 1980, and stayed weak until Bill Clinton’s emergence. The major reason was that during a time of transition, the left clung to its old defenses of more government, more bureaucracy.

Walter Mondale famously declined to answer when critics pressed him to pick an issue where he parted from Democratic orthodoxy, and confused a lack of imagination with resolve. Republicans court the same outcome, defeat followed by irrelevance, if their only answer to Obama is to double down on their philosophical certainties.

A few modest ideas: first, Republicans should broaden their case against Obama’s agenda on health care and financial regulation beyond ritualistic assertions about “freedom” and “liberal statism.” The more salient truth, for most Americans, is that health insurance premiums are on the rise, again; that the banking industry is still dangerously leveraged; and that the collapse of middle class home values is the greatest reverse distribution of wealth in our times. There are conservative, market-centered solutions to each problem, and the Republican nominee ought to be running on them.

Second, while Republicans didn’t manage to draft Chris Christie, they would be smart to copy his willingness to reform the public sector to make it more accountable. That means instead of short-changing education as a state issue, they aggressively challenge the rigidity of the teachers’ unions, especially the untenable proposition that teaching is the one profession where poor performance should not equate to dismissal.

Third, the Republican nominee should avoid the “Mondale” standard of refusing to budge an inch from his base. If it is Newt Gingrich, he shouldn’t retreat from an immigration policy that strengthens the border but avoids decimating families, even at the risk of offending the nativists on his right. If it is Mitt Romney, he ought to expand on his criticisms of certain tax policies that privilege unearned wealth over work.

The “class warfare” trope is the rejoinder Democrats want to hear to Obama’s vision. What would discomfit them most is a campaign that promises to deliver in the places Obama couldn’t succeed.

Not about the lunacy of his latest television commercial in which he implies that gay soldiers are keeping our children from celebrating Christmas in schools. In less than a day Perry’s ad has become the one thing in politics everyone you know could agree on.

Online gay activist George Takei (Sulu from the originalStar Trek series) had one word for the ad: “vomit.” Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan mockingly noted that Perry was wearing the same Carhart jacket as Heath Ledger’s closeted gay character did in Brokeback Mountain. Even Rick Perry’s top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, called the ad “nuts.”

Of course they’re all right, but that’s not the point and Perry knows it. Texas children get to sing Christmas carols to their hearts’ content at public school assemblies even with a Halfrican-American president in the White House. Perry’s ad offends non-Christians, gays, and reason itself, but the white evangelicals who made up 60% of the Iowa caucuses in 2008 could not care less about how they look on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

"Perry is seeking to tap into this notion of the ‘persecuted evangelical’ that none of the GOP candidates, and almost none of the conservative mouthpieces, are expressing,” noted Democratic pollster Zac McCrary. “Perry isn’t going to become relevant by singing the same tune as Romney and Gingrich, and there is certainly a sizable niche of Iowa evangelicals who earnestly believe they’re core beliefs are mocked and attacked by mainstream American. Perry is also no doubt correct that he can be an effective vehicle for this message, especially compared to a twice-divorced creature of the beltway and a formerly pro-choice, pro-gay rights Mormon. Perry’s ad may or may not catapult him back into contention, but I do believe it will have many Iowa evangelicals nodding in their Barcaloungers.”

Rick Perry did not become the most powerful Texas politician since Lyndon Johnson by being stupid all the time. While every national pundit is digging his political grave, Perry is climbing out of the single digits in Iowa. With as many as two-thirds of Iowa Republicans telling pollsters they could change their minds, literally anyone besides Jon Huntsman could finish in the top three.

Perry has been dragging bottom for a month in Iowa, but among evangelicals he’s tied for second with Rep. Ron Paul but well behind former Speaker Newt Gingrich. Republican frontrunners seem affected by an inexorable gravity pulling them down to earth, and Perry has to count on Gingrich with his three wives, his fat sort of-lobbying contract with Freddie Mac and his giant ego not being immune to this force. And polls show that the only things more unpopular with Iowa Republicans than Romneycare are Ron Paul’s foreign policy positions. Apparently they want to leave their Christian soldiers over there.

Perry’s ad is an attempt to put him in a position to pick up evangelical voters if Gingrich and Paul start shedding them. Perry’s ad speaks directly to the 15% of Iowa Republicans who told the Washington Post/ABC pollsters that their top priority was social issues such as gay marriage.

Beating up on gays to score political points is no longer a safe bet, even for Republicans, most of who would rather their prospective presidents talk about fixing the economy. But if 15% of Iowa Republicans want to hear about religious values, then Perry wants every one of them.

This is Perry’s last stand. Getting half of all evangelical voters translates to 30% at the Iowa caucuses, and in this fractured field that could be enough for first place. Finishing in second or third means he has risen from the dead and can make at least as far as Florida. Finishing fourth, where he currently is in the polls, means it’s over for Perry.

The problem for Rick Perry isn’t whether he’s already dead. It’s whether resurrection is still possible. “It may be a pretty ad and an effective message, but it’s way too late and delivered by a totally discredited messenger,” agreed Democratic media consultant Bob Doyle. “Looks like Rick Perry’s Alamo.”

Doyle’s probably right. Asked whom they trust most on social issues, Iowa Republicans ranked Perry sixth, ahead of only Huntsman. The worst thing about Perry’s ad isn’t the intellectually dishonest attack on gays in the military. The fatal flaw of the Perry ad is that it has Rick Perry in it.

Ken FeltmanPast president; International Association of Political Consultants :

Turn Down the Sound

If you turn down the sound while watching the Republican presidential candidates, you may get a different impression from the one you get with the sound on. What that means is not clear without a lot more research, but it is intriguing. A woman in California concluded, "Without the voices I took an instant dislike to (one candidate) and I watched the facial expressions and their eyes. That was very revealing, weird in a way, like they were naked."

Here are reactions to the GOP candidates:

Mitt Romney: "This guy has a mean streak." "I liked him but now I see something and I don't like him." "He has this glare." "His eyes show he is cold." "Not real friendly, is he?"

Newt Gingrich: "He appears to be pompous." "He thinks he better than us." "He's sure full of himself." "He thinks he's special." "He's lecturing ... and he needs to be in a classroom." "He's got a very strong opinion of himself."

Ron Paul: "He just looks confused." "His arms, like he's getting ready to flap off to another planet." "It's scary to see how stupid he looks without sound." "I just got this uncomfortable feeling."

Rick Perry: "The way his mouth is open a lot when he's listening, as if he doesn't follow it." "He's arrogant." "He doesn't look like he gets it." "He's pushy." "He shows up as real cocky."

Jon Huntsman: "He has a noticeable smirk." "He shows his boredom."

Did any Republican candidate fare better without the sound? Herman Cain ran away with the soundless debates. Voters mentioned his "presence," "smile," and his "clear eyes" or "intelligent eyes." Rick Santorum was the only other candidate who got more favorable than unfavorable comments.

The Democrats would not be pleased with the reactions to soundless speeches by President Obama. Some voters used words and expressions such as "preachy," "arrogant," "talking down," and "pointing and blaming us."

Do these impressions come through, however filtered and diluted, to voters who watch and listen while distracted or preoccupied, as many of us do much of the time? One thing is sure: If party leaders come up with anything close to these unscientific findings, they are going to think twice before again exposing presidential candidates to the close-up scrutiny of multiple and frequent debates.

If they decide there is any truth in the research, party professionals will work first to limit the damage. They will want to know whether everyone is diminished by debate-style exposure to the camera. Then some will try to take advantage of the situation by coaching their candidates.

Whatever happens, someone will be elected. A good question: How damaged we allow the candidates to become before we must elect one?

In George Orwell’s novel “1984”, Big Brother maintains power by regularly inciting party members and the “proles” with gruesome videos portraying the atrocities of a fictitious enemy. The masses know it as the Two Minute Hate, but even the cynical among them find it hard to resist: the evil of the other side is made too repulsive, the portrayal of innocents being crushed too provocative. In Osawatomie, Kan., this week, President Obama unveiled his own Two Minute Hate that similarly left his audience shaking their fists and demanding blood.

Orwell’s Big Brother used the daily video sessions to distract his subjects from the economic failure of his regime, to redirect their misery, and in Obama's case to create an anti-capitalism atmosphere in conjunction with the Mitt Romney caricature he plans to paint over the coming year.

Starting with Osawatomie, we can now expect that on nearly every “official” visit to any city with a television camera, the president’s audience will be served the equivalent of political pornography, arousing animal passions with the basest of verbal imagery. Obama’s Goldstein (the pervasive evildoer in Big Brother’s videos), he says, is in our midst and readily identifiable by the bottom line of their Form 1040’s and their job title: Employer.

I’m not excusing the handful of billionaire tax-dodgers or defending the idle rich and their tax-exempt bond portfolio, but they are not the “they” to which the president is directing the hate he hopes to inspire. In his words and his tax and regulatory proposals, “they” refers to business, small as well as large, and to anyone earning as little as $200,000 – before taxes. Be sure to spit on them if they happen by, and demand their papers if they claim to be no more than a middle manager.

In 2009, the share of after-tax income held by the top 1 percent of earners was lower than it was in 1986, 1996 and 2006 (about 12 percent on average over the period). Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office declared that the federal income tax in 2007 was “notably more progressive” than it was in 1979. For a president whose tenure mirrors Jimmy Carter’s in so many ways, he ought to at least appreciate how much more the government spends on health care and education and transfers from the rich to the middle class than it did when his role model was in office.

Steve Jobs, whose company reminded America of Orwell and the Two Minute Hate in its iconic 1984 Macintosh Superbowl commercial, angrily warned Obama that his crude anti-business rhetoric was having a depressing effect on business and the economy, and that it would ultimately backfire. The president has ignored Jobs’s advice, betting like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth that even the most cynical independent voter will be blinded by vulgar class war imagery. Let’s hope that in 2012 voters will emulate Apple’s tank-topped avenger in the commercial, and let the hammer fly.

Lawmakers will soon flee Washington with much unfinished business. But policy innovations have been plentiful in 2011, as a recent POLITICO glossy section described in detail. Here are Arena contributors' takes on the top policy breakthroughs of the past year.

Regulation is too important an issue to leave to conservatives, whose “kill-them-all” attitude would endanger public health and safety. What America needs instead is progressive regulatory reform that removes impediments to economic innovation and growth.

But here’s the problem: While Washington is full of agencies that can create new rules, there’s no entity charged with systematically weeding out regulations that are redundant, too costly or that have simply outlived their usefulness.

Michael Mandel, PPI’s chief economic strategist, has proposed a creative fix: a Regulatory Improvement Commission (RIC) modeled on the BRAC Commissions for evaluating military base closures. The RIC will take a principled approach to evaluating and pruning existing regulations, gather input from all stakeholders (not just business or just agencies) and do so in a manner that ensures we protect public health, safety and the environment.

The Commission will be charged with identifying a limited number of regulations that can be eliminated, consolidated or simplified. As such, it’s designed as a politically feasible alternative to GOP attempts to take a meat ax to federal regulation.

It’s also a more effective alternative to President Obama’s executive order charging agencies with evaluating their own regulations, because it will include broader stakeholder input to identify target regulations and examine the cumulative impact of them across agencies, not just within the silo of a single department or agency’s jurisdiction.

The intent behind the RIC is not to create a mechanism to sidestep Congress and dismantle major substantive regulations that are politically controversial, like EPA pollution rules. Instead, we are trying to get beyond business as usual to identify the regulations that are not critical to protecting things we value highly but are still burdensome, inefficient, outdated, or duplicative.

The Commission should sort through the suggestions, examine the evidence in a serious way, and hold public hearings, as the BRAC commissions did. Then it should vote on a package of 15-20 regulatory changes that meet the original specific goals. All deliberations of the Commission must be public, to ensure public confidence in the specific judgments that the members will ultimately make in recommending regulatory changes.

The package of regulatory changes is then subject to congressional and presidential approval. Ideally, the congressional vote should be a fast-tracked, up-or-down vote, with no room for breaking the package apart. As in the case of BRAC, this will guarantee a single vote for or against regulatory improvement, rather than individual regulations.

In 2011, Washington witnessed a key innovation in policy-index community. Complementing the indices familiar to Washington – e.g. Failed States Index, Terrorism Index – the US Peace Index (USPI), launched in 2011 by the Institute for Economics and Peace, is one of the first indices to assess the true cost of violence and the true economics of peace.

Recognizing that violence creates costs for businesses and governments and reduces overall economic productivity, the USPI highlights the substantial positive economic impact that even small improvements in peace can have. A conservative estimate of the economic effect on the U.S. economy, if America was as peaceful as Canada for example, is $361 billion per year and a stimulatory effect of 2.7 million jobs. Given America’s high debt and unemployment, these numbers matter.

If Washington wants to realize savings, secure newfound funds and seize these jobs, the answer lies in the USPI, which shows that peace is linked to opportunity, health, education and the economy. States that rank higher on these social and economic factors tend to have higher scores in peace - indicating that access to basic services, good education, good health and the opportunity to succeed, is linked to peace. Improving these factors also creates additional economic activity.

As Congress struggles to forge a fiscally sustainable way forward, the USPI sheds much-needed light on yet-unrealized savings, worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Despite Washington’s tendency to pursue policies that primarily react to violence – creating a less economically prosperous and less peaceful country – it would behoove it to take seriously the USPI.

Peace dividends are possible, but only through policies that prioritize equal opportunity, health, education and poverty alleviation. Since doing so will save American lives and money, the time for outside-the-box-thinking is now. Our peace, and our economy, depends on it.

The most important policy innovation this year came not in the U.S. but in Europe.

The 27 countries of the European Union finished designing the first transnational instrument of direct democracy in the world. It’s called the European Citizens’ Initiative. And it gives the people of the 27 member states of the EU the opportunity to introduce legislation directly to the European Commission — the most powerful body in the EU structure — simply by gathering signatures on petitions.

The proponents of the legislation must collect a total of 1 million valid signatures across at least seven EU countries. This is a novel tool of transnational democracy, allowing Europeans to come together and advocate as Europeans — and not merely as citizens of their own country — for legislation. The initiative process also could provide a counterweight for a distant, bureaucratic European government that makes policy transnationally, without facing any kind of transnational democratic accountability.

And this is an idea that could spread. Once the European Commission starts turning down this legislation, it won’t be long before Europeans begin demanding the right to vote on legislation directly — which would give them transnational elections and ballot initiatives. In a world where multinational corporations and government bodies hold so much power, multinational democratic structures and institutions must be built, as well. Europe has made a beginning.

Despite its failure, the supercommittee is the most important policy innovation of the year. This is not because it worked — it obviously did not — or that the idea is so groundbreaking, or even because a trillion dollars or so in savings will solve our looming budget crisis. The innovation is in the fact that the creation of the supercommittee indicates a recognition of both the enormous scale of our debt problem and the understanding that we will require extra-normal means to force difficult solutions through our stalled political process. The supercommittee is dead. Bring on the super-duper committee.

Most ideas that emerged in 2011 brewed on bookshelves and in think tanks and policy shops around town for years. Policy ideas are like a fine wine — as the folks at E.&J. Gallo Winery tell us, “Sell no wine before its time.” Here are the ideas whose time came in 2011:

• Reforming of federal pensions: Washington has finally come around to realizing we need to change the financing of federal pensions by increasing the contribution of employees into the Federal Employees Retirement System. My colleagues Jim Kessler and Dave Kendall developed the idea in 2010, and it went nowhere. Then, it caught fire in 2011. Reforming FERS was on every policy playlist in town, including Bowles-Simpson, the president’s plan unveiled in April 2011, Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget and Sen. Tom Coburn’s “Back in Black” plan. Reforming FERS would save $250 billion over 20 years. In a nutshell, based on a quirk in the 1986 law establishing FERS, employees contribute only $1 for every $14 the employer contributes. The only private companies with that kind of pension formula were the automakers — and we know what happened to them. That math can’t work. It ought to be a one-to-one contribution.

• A taxpayer receipt: The single-largest cost in almost every family’s budget is the money they send to Uncle Sam; in 2011, conversations began on the Hill and around town about showing taxpayers where their money goes.

• A national clean-energy standard: It’s time to rethink the path to a clean-energy future in favor of one that allows Arizona to excel in solar and Alabama to go big in nuclear. A clean-energy standard, as the president proposed in his State of the Union, emerged in 2011, but its realization is still an election away. A CES would set benchmarks for clean fuel and allow for flexible targets between states. The goal is to get every state to produce cleaner energy, though not all at the same pace — California is not West Virginia. In Third Way’s CES plan, we include nuclear as clean fuel and allow natural gas to count as cleaner fuel to reach goals.

• Marriage for gay and lesbian couples: We’ve come a long way since 1996, when the Defense of Marriage Act was passed. Marriage for gay couples is not our idea, but a crucial change in how it is messaged and discussed could help it become law in many more states. Based on three years of research, Third Way’s Social Policy & Politics team has urged supporters to change the frame from “rights and benefits” to “commitment.” The challenge is to convince the ideological middle that gay couples want to marry for the same reasons as straight couples — to make a lifetime commitment that will stick through thick and thin. Leading Republicans and Democrats have recently signed on to our Commitment Campaign, including Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and others.

• State of the Union seating: We began the year asking Congress to sit together during the State of the Union instead of in their partisan encampments. Maybe it didn’t change the world, but it changed congressional history.

In his “brain freeze” debate moment, Texas Gov. Rick Perry glibly noted that if he were ever president, he would “do away with” the departments of Education, Commerce and then “oops” — he could not remember the third department he wanted to lop off willy-nilly, just like the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland.”

Some called his forgetfulness “retribution” for mentioning Education in the first place. Others called it ridiculous to wish Education away. Is he also thinking of doing away with all federal aid to Education? And so much more, ever since Arne Duncan arrived as President Barack Obama’s secretary of education. Duncan has been called the most assertive education secretary ever, and he vies with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as Obama’s most effective Cabinet secretary.

In 2009, he turned the education world upside down with a $4 billion Race to the Top competition in which states were pitted against each other in reaching for the brass ring of millions of dollars in education grants. The initiative, which saw Tennessee and Delaware receive the first grants last year, changed the education landscape, with many reforms coming directly from teachers themselves.

In 2011, the competitive nature of education grants continued, even though critics charged that the rewards are not shared evenly and, therefore, some states suffer. Duncan has begged to differ, noting that even states that did not win grants have made “unprecedented changes” in their state education laws because they want to get in the game.

This year, Duncan announced two new competitions: the Early Learning Challenge and the Digital Promise initiative. He said the Early Learning Challenge is a “game changer” that will make more slots available for poor children in early education, align early-education programs with K-12 curriculums and improve training for teachers.

The Digital Promise initiative is meant to transform teaching and learning inside and outside of classrooms while creating a business environment that rewards innovation and entrepreneurship.

Duncan believes that a healthy dose of competition is good for education, and he intends to continue on this course. Just recently, he raised the bar again by saying, “We need to elevate teachers” and endorsing a “doubling” of their salaries. That would amount to the biggest innovation yet.

The Obama administration’s Cloud First policy has the potential to help agencies provide more reliable and innovative services despite resource constraints. If implemented smartly, Cloud First can allow the government to pay only for the IT resources it consumes.

But more than a few concerns have been raised about the government’s embrace of the cloud, and moving forward, agencies should carefully ensure that some key principles are adhered to as cloud-based solutions are implemented.

Government should insist on standards-based cloud approaches. It should require “mix-and-match” flexibility and capability. It should resist “multitenant” approaches to help ensure security, permit more rapid deployment and accommodate increased capacity. And it should demand easy “integration”; buying a hodgepodge of IT solutions didn’t make sense before government embraced the cloud, and it doesn’t make sense now. Cloud First offers the chance for government to do more with less — but only if it’s implemented wisely.

My nomination for best policy idea of the year is a financial speculation tax. The Joint Committee on Taxation just scored the bill offered by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) as a proposal that would raise more than $350 billion over the next decade. This is real money that would come almost exclusively out of the pockets of Wall Street. In other words, it would raise a substantial sum of revenue by eliminating wasteful speculation by the highflying finance types. What could possibly be better?

Education reform was front and center for many states during 2011. From new or expanded charter school laws to the once-controversial notion of school choice — aka vouchers — to performance pay for teachers and tenure reforms, education dominated headlines and statehouses. But for all the activity, the sweeping reforms that took place in Indiana stand out.

The innovations in the Hoosier State broke the decades-old fixation on zoning children into schools by ZIP code, creating a new environment of expansion for charter schools and giving school districts new flexibility in addressing inflexible union contracts.

In just one legislative session, Indiana catapulted itself to the top of the list for school choice states. And the benefit of the hard work came into focus in November, when Indiana’s became the nation’s largest first-year program, with nearly 4,000 students accepted for school vouchers.

The statewide program, which has the broadest eligibility of any school choice program in the country, allows low- and middle-income families the ability to choose a private school.

The Legislature also took steps to increase the number of quality charter schools offering public-school options when it approved a proposal to allow most of the state’s private colleges to sponsor charter schools. It enabled charters to take over unused buildings owned by traditional public schools. The state also gave online virtual charter schools a boost with more equitable funding.

That level of reform would have been enough to satisfy many states. But in Indiana, the Legislature went a step further and addressed some of the inherent flaws that have plagued education throughout the nation.

Indiana limited the scope of collective-bargaining agreements between teachers unions and school districts, established performance pay for teachers and tied student performance to the teacher evaluation process. With the disappearance of ironclad tenure for teachers and the arrival of merit-based promotions, Indiana has laid the groundwork for public-school reforms that will revolutionize its industry of learning.

Written with Elaine Kamarck, co-chair of Reducing America’s Taxes Equitably

Bipartisan tax reform is on the horizon.

In a year that has been famously short on bipartisanship, one of the most important policy developments has been the return of bipartisan consensus on tax reform, defined as lower tax rates and a broader tax base. That’s the consensus that we saw back in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski worked together to enact pro-growth tax reform.

Today, a quarter-century later, a revived consensus — not yet fully formed but, nonetheless, forming — gives us hope that Washington officialdom can once again come together for the common good. And that common good can be defined as two connected concepts: first, more jobs from faster economic growth, and second, greater public confidence that the Tax Code is transparent and equitable.

This consensus includes a wide spectrum of leaders and experts — including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, the “deficit hawks” of the Simpson-Bowles commission, and many top economists. All have come to realize that at 35 percent, America has the second-highest corporate income tax rate in the industrialized world and that this high tax rate damages America’s economic competitiveness. And so, all converged around the idea that the corporate tax rate should be reduced in order to strengthen American business and create jobs. Yet at the same time, as rates are lowered, this consensus further maintains the Tax Code should be “cleaned up” to eliminate the breaks and shelters that infuriate so many Americans.

It’s said that politics is the art of the possible and so, too, is policy. The lower-rates-and-fewer-breaks vision is one tax reform plan that could be enacted. The country is mad at politicians of both parties these days. A tax deal could be beneficial to both sides. It is not only good policy; it’s also good politics.

Policy initiatives from the right proliferate. Fairly or not, when we hear the term “policy initiative,” we often associate it with reform and, hence, classify it as coming from the liberal side of the political spectrum. In the past few years, however, a wide range of proposals designed to enact the agenda of social conservatives have been successfully making their way through state legislatures, mostly those dominated by Republicans, in the South and elsewhere. In some cases, these measures have already had a significant effect.

The recent action of the Obama administration in suing the state of South Carolina to block implementation of its new law requiring that police check the immigration status of everyone they detain highlights one of these areas. Similar laws, focusing on denial of government services or easier detection of illegal immigrants, have been enacted in Arizona, Texas and New Mexico, which border Mexico, but also elsewhere. In Alabama, a law requiring teachers to inquire about the immigration status of students resulted in substantial withdrawals from schools; it has been temporarily barred by a judicial order. In Virginia, Loudoun and Prince William counties enacted strict laws barring illegal immigrants from receiving many government services; the laws also require local police to arrest illegal immigrants discovered in routine traffic stops. In Georgia, laws to combat illegal immigration caused a shortage of agricultural laborers, inspiring Republican Gov. Nathan Deal to propose putting those on criminal probation to work picking fruits and vegetables.

These socially conservative policy initiatives at the state and local level could have legs. If the GOP wins the White House next year, keeps control of the House and gets a majority in the Senate, similar measures could be enacted at the federal level.

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About the Arena

The Arena is a cross-party, cross-discipline forum for intelligent and lively conversation about political and policy issues. Contributors have been selected by POLITICO staff and editors. David Mark, Arena's moderator, is a Senior Editor at POLITICO. Each morning, POLITICO sends a question based on that day's news to all contributors.